Can we agree that redis, MongoDB and Postgres have excellent documentation? For all practical intents and purposes these project come as close to the ideal software project has perfect documentation as it will ever be. Yet RedisLabs (the company behind Redis), Mongo INC (the company behind Mongo) and EnterpiseDB (biggest Postgresql Consultant and Development Sponsor) all offer paid Support. If that quote was true, what are they selling? Or more over, what are companies buying? There is no ideal software project, that no one needs support for (other than the one program never written and never used). Stop making those arguments.

Quite the opposite, I’d argue: for the raise in popularity of these project, increasingly greater documentation was mission critical – they wouldn’t have been ever become popular without it. Software companies know that: When you write good documentation, more people will be able to use the software, making the software more popular, increasing the chances that people use it in production and for critical services that they are willing to spend bucks on having support and services for. With good documentation, you aren’t eating away from your support-market-pie, you are making the pie bigger.